Innovation has accelerated with the rapid development of the RISC-V
ecosystem

BERKELEY, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–The RISC-V Foundation, a non-profit corporation controlled by its
members to drive a new era of processor innovation via the adoption and
implementation of the free and open RISC-V instruction set architecture
(ISA), today announced that the RISC-V Foundation’s membership has
surpassed 235 organizations, individuals, academics and universities
from 27 countries and six continents around the world. The RISC-V
ecosystem has experienced explosive growth since the RISC-V Foundation’s
inception in 2015, with more than 100 percent membership growth over the
past year. There has been an increased commercial adoption and a growing
number of implementations, including an expanding footprint in China and
the wider APAC region.

“RISC-V is changing the way companies innovate, reshaping the silicon
landscape through open standard collaboration. We’ve reached a critical
mass of companies adopting RISC-V and actively contributing to the
ecosystem,” said Martin Fink, interim CEO of the RISC-V Foundation and
Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at Western
Digital. “It’s exciting, we’re at a point where we have a viable
alternative to general purpose compute architectures. Based on our
growth over past year, it is evident that other organizations are
embracing RISC-V. ”

Companies around the world are taking advantage of the flexibility,
scalability and extensibility of RISC-V as an alternative to closed,
proprietary ISAs. RISC-V has been designed into a wide variety of
applications including graphics engines, machine learning and AI,
networking, storage, security, embedded and general purpose processors.
There is also a growing ecosystem of OS support, development tools, FPGA
softcores, IP and design services. The expansive RISC-V ecosystem
includes Platinum RISC-V Foundation members Antmicro, Berkeley
Architecture Research, Bluespec, C-SKY, Cortus, Google, Marvell,
Microchip Technology, Micron Technology, NVIDIA, NXP, Orion, Qualcomm,
Rambus Inc., Samsung, Sanechips Technology Co., SiFive, Thales and
Western Digital.

This membership milestone follows a year of significant RISC-V ecosystem
momentum. In 2018, the RISC-V Foundation formed the Security
Standing Committee to bring together industry leaders to share
findings, develop consensus around best security practices and identify
potential security improvements for RISC-V based Internet of Things
(IoT) devices, embedded systems and machine learning implementations. To
build on the RISC-V Foundation’s growing footprint in China across more
than 25 companies and universities, the organization formed the China
Advisory Committee to further accelerate adoption of the RISC-V ISA
in the region. The RISC-V Foundation also announced a joint collaboration
with the Linux Foundation to grow the RISC-V community with improved
support for the development of new applications and architectures across
all computing platforms.

Last year the RISC-V Foundation held a number of successful events
across Asia, North America and Europe, including the RISC-V Summit in
Santa Clara, Calif. where more than 1,100 attendees from over 20
countries gathered to discuss RISC-V implementations and share findings.
The next RISC-V Foundation event, the RISC-V
Workshop Taiwan, will be held in Hsinchu, Taiwan from March 12-13,
2019. The RISC-V
Workshop Zurich will take place in Zurich, Switzerland from June
11-13, 2019.

RISC-V (pronounced “risk-five”) is a free and open ISA enabling a new
era of processor innovation through open standard collaboration. Founded
in 2015, the RISC-V Foundation comprises more than 235 members building
the first open, collaborative community of software and hardware
innovators powering a new era of processor innovation. Born in academia
and research, the RISC-V ISA delivers a new level of free, extensible
software and hardware freedom on architecture, paving the way for the
next 50 years of computing design and innovation.

The RISC-V Foundation, a non-profit corporation controlled by its
members, directs the future development and drives the adoption of the
RISC-V ISA. With support from the Linux Foundation, members of the
RISC-V Foundation have access to and participate in the development of
the RISC-V ISA specifications and related HW / SW ecosystem. More
information can be found at www.riscv.org.